


an exercise in choice

by lucyjaggat



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Murder Mystery, Post-Canon, Romulans, Section 31, psychic manifestation of the enemy within to solve murders
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 15:37:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18831592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucyjaggat/pseuds/lucyjaggat
Summary: I could only imagine what Benjamin would have said. That was the thing, though. He was gone and the rest of us had to live with the world he’d left behind.  // a hardboiled mystery starring Ezri Dax





	an exercise in choice

Some days I wake up and it takes a good ten minutes to remember who I am. Things flash in my mind, memories as vivid as the day I first lived them. But it wasn’t really me who lived them—it was Jadzia, or Curzon, or Audrid. On bad mornings it’s memories from Joran. This was one of those mornings. 

I had woken from a deep sleep, the odd lights in my quarters providing a comforting glow most of the time. This time, however, I was covered in a cold sweat that made my sheets feel filmy around me as I wrestled with wakefulness. I used a technique I had learned somewhere, though I couldn’t remember where, or even when. Looking straight ahead, I tried to list every object in my bedroom without pause to think. Lights. Blankets. Sheets. My uniform, hanging over a chair. The replicator. 

Some flowers that Julian had given me, sitting in a vase, drooping a bit from a lack of sunlight or attention. We’d broken up a while back, and it had been fairly amicable. Neither of us cried. It was pretty clear that we had both been looking for something in each other that wasn’t there, or at least wasn’t us to begin with. That heady feeling, the haze of infatuation—it’d all dissipated quickly once we had to live in it. Things I’d found endearing at first soon ceased to pique my interest, and then rapidly became irritating. At the end of it, we’d simply shaken hands and resolved to continue being friends—but later, when it didn’t sting quite as much. 

He was heading to Cardassia in a few days. The Cardassians had requested his medical expertise. I knew things had to be pretty bad if people as proud as the Cardassians were were reaching out to us. When I asked how they had gotten the idea to invite him in the first place, I was surprised to see some hint of pink dawn upon his face. He’d shrugged and muttered something about Garak whispering in the right ear and telling tales, something like that. Whatever it was, it wasn’t my concern anymore. I’ve learned that, in nine lives of break-ups. Space is essential. Connections aren’t forever. You have to let people go. If he wanted to talk to me, he would, but only on his own time. So all I did was wish him the best, knowing how much he would relish the challenge of helping Cardassia rebuild. 

But about the mornings—they were getting easier, yes, but not altogether right. I had my share of bad dreams and uneasy wakings as Ezri, where I’d wake up thinking about the look on Norvo’s face when he realized he was going away, or the jolt of ice in my stomach I’d felt when I put it together and realized what he’d done. That was hard enough. It was waking up in pain as Jadzia, vision hazy as I remembered talking to Worf about our child, that really messed me up. Or living through the moment when Torias realized that the test flight wasn’t going as planned, the rising sense of panic mixed with a cold dread and certainty of death. All those endings tended to put a pall on the morning, and I regularly woke up mid-shout with my heart racing. 

The only thing that really helped was the belongings trick and 

“Fanalean tea, hot.”

Another morning on Deep Space Nine. After a while they began to blur together. 

***

The new Security Chief folded his hands and looked at me. His features were so different than Odo’s, roughly hewn. They gave the impression of a man who had spent years upon years in harsh weather, experiencing heavy winds and scouring sands, maybe even wild encounters with strange flora and fauna. An explorer’s face. 

I knew that wasn’t true, though. He’d been a ships’ man all his life. Grew up in a cargo-running family. Enlisted in Starfleet and quickly rose through the ranks. I’d read his file, using the access I was allowed as a Counselor. I’d read it after I received his message asking me to see him to discuss an opportunity. 

“Lieutenant Dax,” he said, looking at me with that measured expressionless face that all good security personnel wore. I’d never been as fascinated with their business as Julian was, all the secrets and the intrigue. Or the uglier parts, blood spatters and projectile trajectories and a neat summation of a life contained in their files. My business was the mind, and occasionally the heart. It thrilled me sometimes to light upon the reason for someone’s inner turmoil and to find a way to alleviate it. Still, I had to admit, even if I thought of myself as a relatively no-nonsense person, I was still standing there, wasn’t I? 

Constable Calvo waved vaguely at the chair in front of his desk. 

“Sit, please,” he ordered. I sat. 

When I left his office fifteen minutes later, I noticed that my hands were shaking. 

***

I thought about the killing a lot. How could I not? The heft of the modified rifle over my shoulder, the strange tint that the visor added to my vision. Sometimes, if I let my focus fade, it was like I was looking through it again, everything that sickly yellow, revealing private lives and hidden things. 

You weren’t really supposed to do the Rite of Emergence so casually. The whole idea of a joined Trill was that we could use the memories and experiences of our previous hosts to make our own decisions, with the information gained over lifetimes. Anything that tended towards the maudlin, the overly-introspective, the narcissistic was to be avoided. Hence the ban on reassociation. Moving forward in all things. 

The thing is, no one had really expressly forbidden it. It was just one of those unwritten rules. And try as I might, I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. Even after thinking about it with the benefit of all the lives before me. Almost all of them would have done what I did. So I did it. 

Still, I could only imagine what Benjamin would have said. That was the thing, though. He was gone and the rest of us had to live with the world he’d left behind. 

***

Kira waved me into her office with the same brevity of movement with which she did everything. I studied her. 

She’d gone back to the short hair that Jadzia remembered, which seemed even redder than the dark auburn she usually had. It suited her slender face and delicate features. Her eyes were different. They were older and sadder. 

Grief had acted as a purgative, removing her of many things and boiling her down to her essence. I think it was the lack of closure that did it. Her faith, something that Jadzia had never really understood in its devotion, demanded that she be delighted with where Benjamin ended up. But her heart missed him and sitting in his office every day was like poking a tongue into the space where a tooth had been. 

His baseball was still on her desk. I saw a framed picture of Odo too, that looked like it had been taken in the way of many candids: where the subject is on the cusp of realizing that they are being photographed. Their faces turn up, their posture rises, and a smile begins to quirk the corners of their mouths. Odo, despite his protestations, reacted just the same as any of us solids, and the effect was unexpectedly winsome. I understood why Kira had kept the picture, as old-fashioned as it must have seemed. 

She told me she was aware of what Calvo had asked me to do. I nodded, and tried to explain. She held up a graceful hand. 

“It’s best if we keep these things separate,” she said mildly. I scanned her face for some hint of urgency. She looked back at me with that steady calm she’d cultivated in the past year or two. I remembered her seven years ago, that sense she gave of a live wire ready to shock anyone who came too close. The danger was still there, just submerged beneath her skin. 

I thought about how close Nerys and Jadzia had been. They’d spent so many long nights in Quark’s gossiping about men. Jadzia was lucky in love. Kira wasn’t. The vast difference in experience meant they had a wealth of topics to discuss. They saw each other as confidants, as friends, as comrades. I knew we were nowhere near that, and sometimes that made my heart ache slightly. I figured if we were going to be friends, it would happen. Or not. What Dax gave me was the gift of perspective. So many lives had impressed upon me the virtue of patience.

We spoke some more about routine station business. If I was pressed to recall, I might remember a few details. It wasn’t anything important. Kira was concerned about the duty rosters. It was a regular habit for her, falling back on details like that and worrying over them until she was sufficiently distracted. It really should have been my first hint that something was terribly wrong. 

***

I picked listlessly at my food. I’d ordered the same thing from the replicator that I usually did, an extremely eclectic mixed salad that somehow managed to satisfy my divergent palates. I wasn’t feeling it today, though. It seemed too salty and too sweet all at once, and I ended up just toying with my food. 

I missed having lunch with Worf. He was now the Federation Ambassador to Kronos, and while I knew that Chancellor Martok sorely needed his counsel, I selfishly wished he could have stayed. We’d fallen into an easy friendship, and occasionally even talked about Jadzia. The love was still there but we both knew it was a bad idea. We were extraordinarily poorly suited as lovers and instead decided to carve out our own niche in the complex ecosystem of relationships after death. Sometimes he needed space and that was okay, too. I had days where seeing Worf made my stomach flip in the excitement Jadzia always felt and my blood began to sing. But I knew it for what it was: a mere echo of the bond Worf and Jadzia had shared. I didn’t regret our brief time together, but I knew better than to try and imitate it. 

I didn’t have many friends left on the station. Sometimes I played Tongo with Quark, sometimes Julian and I played his Battle of Thermopylae holo-program, but mostly I just did my best to try and counsel the station’s inhabitants. Being the receptacle for so much grief was wearying but I did my best. The war had only ended a few months ago, and everyone had lost someone. I worked longer hours and saw more patients than I ever had before. I was lucky in one respect: the Bajoran Militia had managed to send up a skeletal staff of counselors for the station, and they helped relieve the workload for me, especially with patients who wanted a more religious orient to their treatment. For now, I found the work engaging and the quiet restful. I usually spent my evenings either in my quarters looking over files or in Quark’s with Julian or the Siskos. 

Kasidy and Jake had stayed. I think they were waiting for Sisko, same as any of us. I hoped he’d be back but I couldn’t swear that in my heart of hearts I really believed it. From what he’d told me, the Prophets had a much different understanding of time than we did, and he could return 500 years from now or today. Kasidy was beginning to show, and Jake, despite the buzz he was getting around his writing, was attentive to her every need and refused to go back to Earth until she was well situated. Apparently Joseph Sisko had given the two of them an earful and demanded they come back to Earth, but at the end of the day they had stayed here and Sisko’s stayed open in New Orleans. 

***

My patient this afternoon was a Bajoran woman who cried silently as she told me about her experiences first in the occupation, and then serving on a ship that was attacked by the Jem Hadar. The amount of grief that the Bajoran people had to bear was titanic. I was thankful that Trill had been largely unscathed in the Dominion War, and then felt a flash of guilt for reveling in my fortune.

Her earring shook with her sobs. I offered her a tissue and patted her back consolingly. There wasn’t much to say in these initial sessions. The object wasn’t for them to speak so much as for me to listen. Words were immaterial. 

She looked at me after a bit. 

“Did you lose someone?” she asked, eyes continuing to swim with unshed tears.

I grappled for an answer. 

“Yes,” I said finally. I thought about my family falling apart in the wake of the Orion Syndicate. I thought about Benjamin’s last day. I thought about Jadzia crumpling to the floor. 

She nodded. “We all did.”

“That’s true,” I said, for lack of something more substantive to say. But the affirmation seemed to ease her heart some, and she accepted an appointment for next week. 

***

As I typed my notes up, I felt that familiar swoop in my stomach. My spacesickness was mostly gone, but it was like a bad penny-it just kept turning up. Sipping tea helped sometimes, as did busying myself with the rhythms of life on the station. It was worse at night when I had little to focus on but the motion of the station and the sound of my own breathing. I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Resolved myself against the nausea. After a minute, it subsided, and I returned to my notes once more.

I was thinking about ways to help the people on the station. I turned to a note I had made last night-- “groups?” Perhaps having a group for grieving station residents would help, or perhaps not. I supposed I wouldn’t know until I tried. I filed a request with Kira to send a bulletin to residents about the idea. Maybe people would respond. Maybe they wouldn’t. I’d have to wait and see.

I checked my calendar on the computer and was relieved to see that I only had one patient left for the afternoon. A Romulan. Larena Pardek. Middle-aged, veteran, suffering from post-traumatic stress resulting from experiences in combat. A bit unusual to see a Romulan, but nothing I wasn’t prepared for. It was unusual that a Romulan would deign to speak to a Trill Counselor, but I guessed Romulans in our sector weren’t exactly spoiled for choice. 

Later I could think over what Calvo had asked me to do, even though every cell in my body revolted against the idea. For now, I had a patient to see. I buzzed her in when I was ready.

A hooded woman entered the room. I was about to ask her to remove her hood—I don’t much like when patients obscure their faces-- when I recognized the profile of her face. That aristocratic nose. The arrogant cheekbones. 

“Senator Cretak,” I said in wonder, and she shrugged off her cloak in answer. 

I’d heard what Julian told me about how she was imprisoned. A terrible plot from Starfleet’s Section 31 to throw one Romulan to the wolves to cultivate another Romulan asset. I’d assumed she was dead, and my lack of curiosity in following up shamed me now as she stood in front of me, unmistakably alive. She was scowling. I’d only met her in passing, as best as I could recall, and I couldn’t think why she had come to me. 

“You are Ezri Dax,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

I tried to stand taller, look older. “Yes, yes, I am, Senator. But...what can I do for you? How--?” 

Senator Cretak cut me off with a look. 

“It pains me to ask for assistance,” she began gravely, “but it seems it is unavoidable. I am in need of your help. I apologize for the deception but I have reason to believe I am being watched.”

I nodded and privately wondered if she might not be mistaken somehow.

“And you...you need my help? As a Counselor?” I hoped she couldn’t tell how confused I was. I was still utterly baffled as to how she had survived, much less made it back to DS9. 

“No, Lieutenant,” she said in that implacably serene, serious voice. “As a murderer.”

Well, that made two people today. I walked over to the replicator and asked for some tea.


End file.
